


Welcoming Tears

by helsinkibaby



Series: Protection [11]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-05
Updated: 2004-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 19:56:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4758986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You said no?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcoming Tears

“No? You said no?”

Ellie closes her eyes, wishes that she’d chosen to have this conversation over the phone. Or via instant messenger. Smoke signals if necessary, but anything would better than sitting across from her younger sister in the living room of her parents’ Manchester farmhouse. It’s just the two of them here this weekend, nowhere to hide, no parents or relatives to distract them, just Ellie and Zoey playing catch-up, and it was meant to be a relaxing weekend. 

However, what with the bottle of wine they’d put away between them, Ellie got a little bit too relaxed, hence her slip of the tongue, hence Zoey’s exclamation, the wide-eyed, slack-jaw stare that accompanied it. 

Ellie knows that there’s no taking back what she just said so she sighs, reaches for the wine bottle and refills her glass, doing the same to Zoey’s. “I said no,” she confirms, and if possible, Zoey looks even more confused. 

“I don’t understand,” she says, and Ellie shrugs. 

“It’s just one of those things-” she begins and Zoey interrupts her. 

“But you and Mark were crazy about one another,” she says. “He’s come here, he’s met everyone, Dad likes him…” At Ellie’s raised eyebrow, she stops, visibly reconsiders. “OK, so he doesn’t like him, but at least he doesn’t hate him…”

Ellie smiles, takes a sip of her wine. “I know all that,” she says. “And Mark’s a great guy, I know that too.”

There is no rancour in her voice, because she’s telling the truth; Mark, her ex-boyfriend as of a week and a half ago, is a nice guy. A fellow scientist in a different division of the lab, he’s funny and charming, and he’s not so hard to look at. He knows about her work, agrees with its aims, and she’s always loved being able to bounce ideas off him. She started dating him almost a year ago now, a few weeks after the dark days of Zoey’s disappearance, when her Secret Service protection was at an all time high, and he’s never been put off by the trappings of her life, by what happens when you’re the President’s daughter and everyone wants a piece of you. She’d thought that he might be, during that whole kerfuffle over the funding, but while she’d been hiding out in the White House, he’d been calling her on the phone, telling her that things were going to be fine, telling her that he was proud of her after her press conference, keeping out of sight of the media even while he made sure she knew that he was there for her. 

He is, without a doubt, one hell of a guy, and one of her best friends. 

He is also, she knows, head over heels in love with her. 

And she loves him too. She does. 

“Then why?” Zoey asks, still unable to fathom Ellie’s reasoning. “If he’s so great, why wouldn’t you marry him?”

An excellent question, and one that Ellie knows she’s going to have to answer from an awful lot of people, people who had seen the proposal coming, just as she had, who had expected an affirmative answer, just as she had. 

Because she’d always thought that when the day came, when Mark went down on bended knee, when he produced a lovely diamond ring that, her mind noted, must have cost him an absolute fortune, that she would say yes. 

The word no had never entered her mind, not until she looked down into his big blue eyes and, for the first time in months, if ever, experienced a pang, because they weren’t brown. 

The second that that thought appeared in her mind, she’d known that she couldn’t say yes to Mark because, much as she might love him, she’s not in love with him. 

The man she’s in love with is a man she can’t have, a Secret Service agent with dark skin and dark eyes and a smile that can light up a room, who can make her feel safe just by being there. He is everything she could ever want, and nothing she can ever have, but she loves him still, and there’s nothing she can do about that. 

She’d known then, in the split second between question and answer, that it wasn’t fair to say yes to Mark, not when she was in love with another man.

But how can she explain to Zoey that Mark’s only fault is that he’s not Wesley Davis, especially when Zoey knows nothing of her relationship with Wesley? 

It takes another, larger, sip of wine before she can speak, and even then, the words barely scratch the surface. “I did love him,” she says quietly. “I just didn’t love him enough.”

Zoey’s eyes are narrow slits of confusion, darting all across Ellie’s face, as if the elusive clue, the missing piece of the puzzle, can be found there. And maybe it can, because her eyes grow wide suddenly, then narrow again, and she says slowly, too slowly, “Ellie… does this have anything to do with…” 

Her voice trails off and Ellie looks down, because she knows what Zoey’s talking about, a conversation held in this very house, in her bedroom upstairs, three years ago come Christmas. A conversation where Ellie told her sister all about the man she was in love with, their one perfect night together, her abortion. She’d cried in Zoey’s arms that day, but they’d never spoken of it since, and Zoey’s not to know that Ellie still thinks about that child every day, thinks of how old he would be – funny, she thinks, how she always thinks it was a son, even though she never let herself think of him as a baby until Molly took her home from the hospital, left her alone in the dark of her apartment. 

“No,” she says, cutting the thoughts off, and she knows that Zoey doesn’t buy the lie for a second, but still she pretends. “Of course it doesn’t.”

Zoey doesn’t believe her, but she doesn’t press her, instead changes the subject to something completely different, something for which Ellie is very grateful. 

But when she drains her glass, refills it with the remnants of the bottle, she knows that her dreams are going to feature a deserted Camp David cabin, with her in Wesley’s arms, reliving that perfect night over and over again in her dreams. 

She’ll wake up crying, but she’ll welcome the tears.


End file.
